The Day of the Donald (15 page)

Friday, August 31, 2018

A
fter an exhausting day of totally boring meetings, Jimmie found himself with an hour to kill until he was supposed to meet Cat for dinner. Most of the staffers had left early for the day to get a head start on Labor Day weekend. As good a time as any to dispose of Lester’s recorder.

He removed it from its hiding spot. The worthless “game-changing” interviews on it had already gotten two men killed. Jimmie had no desire to be the third. And yet . . . he couldn’t quite bring himself to just ditch it. It might come in handy—as evidence for the emerging story. Right now, there was precious little to hold onto. He didn’t know where Lester was buried, and Connor Brent was fish food.

There was a knock at the door. He panicked, stashed the recorder in his desk, and then answered the door.

“You’re not answering your phone,” Chris Christie said, bursting in like Meat Loaf on a motorcycle.

It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“The battery must be dead,” Jimmie said, pulling the door shut.

“Don’t lie to me,” Christie said, muscling his way past Jimmie. He sniffed the air. “I’m from Jersey. I can smell a lie from a mile away.”

“You know, Emma’s phone died Monday morning. Maybe we need new phones. Are we eligible for upgrades?”

“Not sure why somebody would lie about their battery being dead?” Chris Christie paced the length of the room (which wasn’t more than five paces) and spun on his heel. “Let me tell you a little story about a couple of kids named Jack and Diane. They grew up together in the American heartland. One of ’em thought he was gonna be a football star someday. The other was just along for the ride in the back of her boyfriend’s car. I think you can see where I’m going with this.”

“Is this a John Cougar Mellencamp song?”

“Maybe,” Christie said. “But just because Johnny Cougar sang about it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. What I’m trying to say is that Jack wanted to run off to the city, but Diane wasn’t having none of that. But Jack . . . well, Jack was restless. He left one day for LA to be the next James Deen. Became one of them porno stars out there. Forgot all about playing football, which I suppose I would too.”

“I suppose.”

“Damn right you suppose,” Christie said. “But he eventually turns to drugs. Gets in a bad way. Can’t perform no more. Life goes on, though, a long time after the thrill of living is gone. He’s depressed, and he thinks about Diane. Sweet Diane. By this point, he’s gone balls deep in hundreds of girls, but she’s still the only one he’s ever loved. He texts her, and she doesn’t answer.”

“Because her phone is dead.”

“Except that it wasn’t. She’d seen his text but ignored him. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to get all mixed up with Jack again. But that text . . . the more she thought about it, the more
she thought about leaving her husband and kids behind. You see, for her, life had gone on too. The thrill wasn’t there either. Finally, she texted him back: ‘Sorry, my phone died. Didn’t see your text.’ But it was too late. Jack was dead. He’d taken an overdose of Viagra. His wiener exploded.”

“That’s terrible,” Jimmie said. “And this really happened?”

“I have no idea. I’m just telling you why someone would lie about their battery being dead. That’s just one reason. I could probably think of . . . a few more. Another kid named Tommy, used to work down on the docks. His gal Gina’s working at the diner all day. They’re both down on their luck, just trying to hold on to what they GOT!”

Christie slammed a large paw down on the desk, which rattled the fillings in Jimmie’s back teeth. The drawer slid open, and Christie peered over the desk into it. “Do you mind . . . ?”

“Go ahead,” Jimmie said as Christie picked his phone up. He thought he saw Christie’s eyes linger on the recorder, but maybe that was Jimmie’s paranoia.

Christie held down the power button. Jimmie’s screen saver flashed on the phone.

“Cute girls,” Christie said. “These your kids?”

Christie’d been at every Trump rally to date, right behind the president . . . and he didn’t know who was on Jimmie’s screen saver?

“Those are the USA Freedom Girls for America,” Jimmie said. “They’re all legal. In some states.”

Christie snorted. “Looks like your battery is fine, wouldn’t you say—”

The screen went black.

Christie thrust the dead phone into Jimmie’s hands. “Keep it charged from now on, okay? Emma was trying to reach you for the past forty-five minutes. Thought maybe you’d gone home, but I said I’d check up on you. And here you are.”

“Here I am,” Jimmie said. “Do you know what she wanted?”

“A half hour opened up in the president’s schedule. He wants to talk to you.”

Jimmie plugged his phone into his charger. When he turned around, Christie was still blocking the door.

“One more thing,” Christie said, reaching into his suit jacket . . .

C
hristie’s hand emerged with a burgundy, leather-bound Bible. He hadn’t pegged Christie as a Bible-thumper, but stranger things had happened. Here he was, trying to recruit Jimmie over to the side of the angels. Good luck with that.

“Thanks, but I already have a Bible I don’t read,” Jimmie said.

“I know—you left it behind at the Royal Linoleum,” Christie said.

“I left it behind . . . ?” Jimmie’s voice trailed off as it hit him: This was the Gideon Bible from his bedside table. The one he’d marked up with Morris code.

This isn’t happening
, he thought.
This can’t be happening
.

Jimmie was beginning to have a hard time distinguishing between his imagination and reality. Maybe he’d suffocated in that tunnel underneath the wall. His comatose body could be laid out in some Mexican hospital right now while all of this was happening in his head. One long dream from which he might never wake up.

You know you’re in desperate straits when the best-case scenario is that you’re in a permanent coma.

Christie said, “I did a little security sweep, to make sure you hadn’t left any sensitive material behind. Thought at first this was placed there by the hotel, but then I saw the inscription on the inside.” Christie’s eyes met his. “The inscription from your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Her message seemed to be . . . of a personal nature. A
very
personal nature,” Christie said, handing the Bible over. “It’s fortunate I discovered it, wouldn’t you say?”

Jimmie cracked the Bible and peeked at the chicken-scratches he’d left in it. Chris Christie wasn’t so stupid as to believe this was a message from Jimmie’s mother . . . unless his mother was a Socialist Justice Warrior.

The book trembled in Jimmie’s hands. The fact that Jimmie wasn’t in some Guantanamo Bay dungeon right now was significant. The fact that Christie was covering for him was even more so. While Christie might have been dangerous, he hadn’t killed Lester—because if he had, he would have killed Jimmie right now and made off with the recorder.

“You’ve got three minutes to get upstairs to the Oval Office,” Christie said, glancing at his watch. “Mr. Trump can’t stand tardiness. You want to hold on to what
you
got, I suggest you get a move on it, Jimmie-boy.”

J
immie took the stairs two at a time and burst into the Reagan Library. His heart was pounding like he’d just hiked to the tip of the Washington Monument. His mind was spinning from what had just happened with Christie. If the White House janitor was indeed sympathetic to the Bernie bros, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Lester’s death. That left one suspect on Jimmie’s list: Corey Lewandowski.

Jimmie went out of his way to avoid passing Lewandowski’s office on his way to meet the president. He wasn’t taking a chance. The Secret Service agents who were usually stationed every twenty yards had taken off for the weekend. He picked up his speed, even as he felt the beginnings of a cramp in his right side.

Emma’s door was open. She wasn’t at her desk—probably gone home for the day like everyone else. Now that it was past five on Friday, the government was all but shut down for the holiday weekend. Jimmie raced through her office, which adjoined the Oval Office.

He glanced at the clock on her wall and saw that he’d made it—miraculously, he’d made it with seconds to spare. The doors to the Oval Office were open a crack. He threw open the double doors and was immediately tackled to the ground.

F
or the second time in one week, Jimmie found himself pinned to the floor of the White House. The golden shag in the Oval Office was loads nicer than the worn, industrial carpet in the press corps pen.

Still, that didn’t make the experience any more pleasant. Corey Lewandowski had hit him squarely in the ribs with a football tackle. He’d heard about getting the wind knocked out of you but had never truly appreciated just how accurate of a description it was until his lungs went flat inside his chest.

His brain felt fuzzy. He was flat on his stomach on the floor, so how was he face-to-face with the Donald? He inhaled a shaky breath, and his surroundings swam into focus: He was lying on a picture of the Donald—shirtless, holding an olive branch in one hand and a bunch of arrows in the other—woven into the carpet on the Oval Office floor.

He tried to roll over, but Lewandowski had a foot on Jimmie’s back.

“I had an appointment,” Jimmie said.

“Shut up or you’re going to have an appointment with my fist,” Lewandowski said.

It sounded to Jimmie like the press secretary was ready to kill him here—no waiting until darkness and throwing him off the roof. Out of the corner of one eye, Jimmie could see Trump peeking his head out over the desk. Just the hedgehog-like hair and a pair of orange-rimmed, beady eyes were visible.

“Let him up,” Trump said, rising to his feet.

Lewandowski stared at the president. “Surely you must be joking.”

“Don’t call me Shirley,” Trump said.

“Sir?”

“It’s from
Airplane!
,” Trump said.

“Roger, Roger,” Jimmie squeaked out.

Lewandowski pressed his foot harder into Jimmie’s back. “Didn’t I tell you to keep quiet?”

“Let him up and hit the golden showers,” Trump said. “Give us a little private time.”

Gradually, the pressure on Jimmie’s back decreased as the press secretary lifted his foot as slowly as humanly possible. Jimmie thought he might give him a kick on the way out, but Lewandowski simply slammed the doors behind him.

Jimmie rolled over and again was face-to-face with Donald Trump. This time, in the form of the painting on the Oval Office ceiling—a version of Michelangelo’s
The Creation of Adam
, except Adam’s face had been replaced by Trump’s.

And so had God’s.

Jimmie pulled himself to his feet and located the one real Trump in the room.

Jimmie was alone with the president.

The president of the United States of America.

The man who had made America great again.

“I would apologize for that, but you really should knock before entering,” Trump said, sitting down and inviting Jimmie to do the same. The president leaned back in his great leather chair and kicked his feet up onto the desk. A flattened hundred-dollar bill was stuck to the bottom of one of Trump’s shoes by a yellowish splotch of gum.

“The door was cracked open,” Jimmie said, sitting across from Trump. “But lesson learned. I thought there’d be Secret Service around, though?”

Trump shrugged. “You all settled into your office?”

“Getting there. Need to put up some posters and make it feel like home.”

“I need to do that around here. All I’ve got up now are these fancy works of art. Like that Rembrandt over there,” Trump said, pointing out the
Mona Lisa
. Probably the original. “A little stuffy, if you ask me. I can’t stand modern art, but some of this old crap is as boring as a national security briefing. Like, would it kill you to put a rack on that gal?”

“I’m not an art man myself.”

Trump sighed. “Least it’s better than the tacky shit in the vice president’s office. A wife like that and all the photos are of Gronkowski. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick.

“You know,” Trump continued, “I like you. I’ve always liked your work. Your
Daily Blabber
column was one of the few sites I read. Just a shame what happened. You should have
gotten a presidential Medal of Honor for what you did for the country.”

“I’ll settle for a Purple Heart,” Jimmie said, rubbing his cracked ribs.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Trump said. “I trust the Watergate is meeting your expectations? It’s a world-class property. One of my favorites.”

“I appreciate you setting me up there—it’s like night and day compared to the last place I stayed. No one’s broken into my room, at least.”

“You had a break-in at the Royal Linoleum?” Trump pulled his feet off the desk and invited Jimmie to follow him. “C’mon. Let’s get some exercise.”

As they exited the Oval Office, they passed a Secret Service agent. “Humble is on the move,” the agent said, speaking into his wrist. “Humble is on the move.”